Last week presidential candidate Mitt Romney said to a CNN interviewer, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.” As soon as the words fell from Romney’s mouth, great flocks of vultures rose to attack him.

“He doesn’t care about the poor,” yelled other candidates. “He loves only the rich and wants to get into office to make them richer still.”

“He doesn’t care about the middle class either. He’s never walked in their shoes,” reporters shouted.

Why, the very least he could do is pretend to care until he’s in office. The very idea!

In defense of the politicians, including Romney, I’d like to say that it’s easy to criticize as an afterthought. I bet it’s not so easy to be spontaneous when a microphone is stuck in your face almost every minute of the day. When you enter the race for President, you must take your bag and baggage and move right into the glass house long before you get a chance to move into the White House. And the great black media vultures are sitting in the trees, waiting to misconstrue your statements, to misquote you, and to take your words out of context. Then they’ll use those words to finish you off. Before you know what happened, you’ll be dusting off what little dignity you have left and riding off into the sunset, slinking back home with your tail tucked between your legs.

Understand immediately that I am not campaigning for Romney. I don’t even particularly like him. Nor do I especially like any of the other candidates in the offing at the moment either. Larry, who avidly watches the news every day, tells me that one candidate is more consistent than the others, no matter who his audience is. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I grow weary of carefully selecting and voting for the lesser of the two evils every time election year comes around.

I’m sure Mr. Romney really doesn’t understand the plight of the poor or of the middle class. He’s never been there, but please point out to me the politician who does understand. If you are a child of either of those classes, you can’t afford to run for political office.

How much does it cost to run for President of these United States of America today? How many million did you say? That follows right along the guidelines set by our founding fathers, right? Or perhaps they thought posterity would have enough sense and integrity to manage that aspect of elections. Not so. Not so at all.

However, no party is safe from the press. Well then, do the members of the press care about the poorest Americans? They say they do. I think words are cheap to them since they sling them about so recklessly. I imagine that writers and reporters care a lot more about a sensational story to present to their superiors and hence to the public at the end of the day. Everybody seems to be chasing his own agenda, and few if any of those agendas are intended to help the poor.

If only we had an honest politician (or non-politician) who cared about all levels of society and would run on an honest platform, then maybe the media would cooperate instead of trying to shoot him in the foot every day of his campaign. Maybe. If such an anomaly still exists, this would be a good time to step forward. I haven’t found my candidate yet, but I’ve found several that I cannot force myself to vote for.

Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember “compassionate conservatism”? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.

At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were.

Wow! Mary Ann, did you every get this one right. You need to be writing for the Jacksonville Times Union...

My only comment is, "FOLLOW THE MONEY", and they say the media is not bias. In Florida alone the GOP candidates spent approximately $30 million dollars and who received most of the free air time. The one spending the most ($).

Just wait until we get past the GOP nomination and we have both the Democrate and Republican candidates with their PAC Money...

Thanks again for your artical...

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